One of the most effective ways to create an “us” is to give people a “them.”

It’s a familiar branding strategy. Build identity, create belonging, establish an opponent. Give people something to rally around and something to rally against.

In business, it can be remarkably effective.
In politics, it can win elections.

But a country isn’t a customer segment.

A company can thrive by serving a particular audience.
A political campaign needs enough people to win.
Neither requires everyone to choose them.

Governing is different.

A campaign can win by mobilizing one group against another.
A government inherits responsibility for both.

And therein lies a fundamental problem with modern political branding: The strategies that help politicians win power can make it harder for them to govern effectively once they have it.

When Winning Becomes the Problem

I’ve spent decades thinking about how brands earn attention, loyalty, and trust. Political campaigns use many of the same tools: compelling identities, simple stories, and clear distinctions between who’s with us and who’s against us.

But winning an election and governing a country require different things.

Campaigns reward contrast, certainty, and conflict. Governing requires negotiation, trade-offs, and the ability to work with people who see the world differently.

Consider a newly elected politician trying to advance legislation that would genuinely benefit their constituents.

If that politician spent the previous year portraying the opposition as dangerous, corrupt, or fundamentally untrustworthy, what happens when cooperation becomes necessary?

A reasonable compromise can suddenly look like surrender. Working across the aisle can feel like betraying the very people who helped secure the victory.

The policy hasn’t changed. The expectations have.

The political brand that helped win the election has become an obstacle to doing the job.

And the problem doesn’t disappear when the votes are counted. The same messages that mobilized supporters can continue to shape what those supporters expect from their leaders.

The Loyalty Trap

When political identity is built primarily around opposition, the opponent becomes essential to keeping the coalition energized.

There’s always another threat to confront. Another reason to rally the base. Another reminder of what’s at stake if the other side wins.

Even after an election, the campaign never really ends.

And the consequences extend beyond politics. When we continually reinforce the idea that the other side is the problem, we gradually lose the ability to see people with different beliefs as legitimate participants in a shared future.

We stop competing over different visions for the country and start competing over who gets to belong in it.

To be clear, this isn’t an argument that both political parties are the same, that every position deserves equal consideration, or that the answer always lies somewhere in the middle.

Some disagreements are fundamental.

Rights matter.

Policies have consequences.

There are things worth fighting for.

But there’s a difference between fighting for what you believe and building an entire political identity around the belief that everyone who disagrees with you is the enemy.

The problem isn’t disagreement.
It’s building loyalty in a way that makes cooperation look like betrayal.

That’s a powerful formula for winning elections.
It’s a terrible foundation for governing.

A Different Measure of Victory

As we approach the midterms, we’ve been hearing plenty about winning.

Which party will control Congress? Who will gain seats? Which voters are turning out?

These are the familiar measures of political success. And elections matter enormously. They determine who holds power and what that power can be used to accomplish.

But we’re measuring only the first bit of success.

What if we judged political leadership not simply by the ability to assemble a winning coalition, but by what that victory makes possible afterward?

Can leaders advance their priorities while recognizing their responsibility to people who opposed them? Can they negotiate without treating compromise as capitulation? Can they leave our institutions, communities, and country more capable of addressing shared problems than they found them?

These questions don’t require us to abandon our convictions. They require us to expect more from the people who represent them.

We spend enormous amounts of money, energy, and attention figuring out how to win elections. We spend far less asking whether those victories will leave the country better off a few years later.

In business, it’s easy to mistake the scoreboard for the mission. Revenue, market share, and loyalty matter, but only if they advance what an organization exists to do.

Politics has the same problem, with much higher stakes.

Success isn’t simply achieving a metric.
It’s advancing the purpose the metric was supposed to serve.

Winning the election is the metric. Making the country work better for everyone is the purpose.

And that’s the problem with winning.

We can become so good at gaining power that we forget what power is for.

The tournament had credentialed nearly 100 content creators to bring tennis to new audiences through food, fashion, celebrity, and lifestyle coverage. The commercial logic was compelling.

More content → more reach → more exposure for the sport

But the attention came with a cost.

Influencers filming during matches caused distractions, prompting complaints from players, including Naomi Osaka and Jessica Pegula.

During one match, the distraction became so intense that play briefly stopped.

Let that sink in. The people there to capture the moment had become the reason the moment was interrupted.

The marketing was working.
The tournament was getting exactly what it wanted → more attention.

And yet some of that attention was making the tennis worse.

The metrics improved. The experience deteriorated.

This is the problem with treating attention as the primary measure of success.

It tells you how many people looked, but not whether the attention made what you do better.

The Incentive Collision

Here’s where it gets interesting.

The U.S. Open wants people to pay attention to tennis.
So it invites people whose livelihood depends on getting others to pay attention to them paying attention to tennis.

Eventually, those objectives collide.

The spectator becomes a performer. The stands become a set. The match becomes background noise.

Now there are two shows competing for attention in the same space.

The creator’s content brings more attention to the tournament, but it also risks disrupting the very thing people came to see.

The player is trying to play tennis. The fans paid to watch it.

Both find their experience disrupted by a performance they never came to see.

The promotional strategy can work while making the thing being promoted worse.

That’s the incentive collision: two groups pursuing perfectly understandable goals that become incompatible when they occupy the same space.

And it’s happening well beyond tennis.

On Nantucket this past summer, a shop owner, tired of his store being used as a backdrop, hung a “No Influencers” sign. The backlash brought so much attention that the shop began offering hundreds of handmade copies for $600 each.

Even the objection became merchandise. Welcome to the attention economy.

When Being There Becomes Currency

Being in the audience once had a simple role: you watched.

Now, being there is currency. A photo or post can bring views, recognition, even income. Simply experiencing something can feel like leaving value on the table.

We’re all encouraged to capture, curate, and prove we were there.

A restaurant designs a dish for the photograph. A traveler chooses a destination for the post. A concert becomes a sea of phones.

The camera starts shaping the experience rather than simply recording it.

“What is worth experiencing?” becomes “What can I get from this?”

And the people creating the experience have every incentive to encourage it. More posts. More reach.

Until the thing that attracted everyone in the first place begins to disappear beneath its own promotion.

When Nothing Is Off-Limits

The same incentive becomes more troubling when the subject never agreed to participate.

In September, The Guardian reported on influencers attempting to film some of the world’s most isolated Indigenous communities. One American content creator illegally traveled to North Sentinel Island, home to the Sentinelese, who have repeatedly resisted outside contact.

For the creator, the reward was exclusive footage. For the community, the risks included violations of their autonomy and exposure to potentially dangerous diseases.

The stakes are far different from a tennis match, but the underlying problem is the same: What benefits the person capturing the experience can harm the people being captured.

Worse, the harder something is to access, the more valuable the content can become.

The incentive has no natural stopping point. Someone has to draw the line.

Which brings me to your brand.

What Are You Actually Growing?

Attention is fleeting. If it’s your primary measure of success, you’re building a brand around something that can disappear as quickly as it arrived.

Building a brand that lasts requires a more durable definition of success, one directly connected to your mission and purpose.

A tennis tournament exists to stage great tennis. A park protects a place while making it possible for people to experience it. A museum preserves and interprets things worth understanding.

Attention can help all three. But attention alone doesn’t tell us whether they’re succeeding.

So yes, count the views, visitors, and engagement. But also ask:

→ Did the tournament turn newcomers into tennis fans?
→ Did the park deepen visitors’ appreciation for protecting the landscape?
→ Did the museum leave people understanding something they hadn’t before?

Those are outcomes worth growing. They tell us not just how many people looked, but what their attention made possible.

And that changes what you reward, whom you invite, and where you draw the line. Sometimes it means saying no to something that would generate excellent numbers but take you further from your purpose.

Are you growing the thing you exist to do, or just the audience watching you do it?

Or Harley-Davidson? The NFL? The Surfrider Foundation?

Would people shrug and find something else? Or would they fight to get it back?

That’s a question every CEO, CMO, and brand strategist should be asking.

Because we’ve become remarkably good at making brands visible. We spend billions on advertising, sponsorships, influencers, and campaigns designed to capture attention.

But attention isn’t attachment.
And being recognized isn’t the same as being missed.

I call it the Disappearance Test.

If your company vanished tomorrow, would anyone’s life actually be worse? Would anything break? Would anyone fight to bring you back?

Or would people just move on?

Pay attention to what people fight to keep

A few years ago, Taco Bell removed the Mexican Pizza.

People lost their minds.

More than 200,000 people signed a petition demanding its return.
Even Doja Cat got threw in.

Taco Bell brought it back, and demand was so intense that stores struggled to keep it available.

We’re talking about Mexican Pizza.

People had plenty of other things to eat. But they wanted that thing.

That’s not awareness. That’s evidence of attachment.

And companies routinely underestimate how much attachment matters.

The distinctive product gets rationalized. The weird feature gets removed. The experienced employee gets replaced. The local gathering gets cut because nobody can prove its quarterly ROI.

Then leaders wonder why loyalty is disappearing.

Sometimes the product isn’t the product

I learned this during the decade I spent leading the Surfrider Foundation.

Our mission was coastal conservation. But what attracted and kept people involved went beyond protecting beaches and oceans.

It was identity. Community. Belonging.

People found others who cared about the same places they did. They made friends, built relationships, and became part of something bigger than themselves.

Harley-Davidson figured this out, too.

Yes, Harley sells motorcycles. But through its owners’ groups, local chapters, rides, and rallies, it also helped people build an identity and community around riding.

Buy another motorcycle tomorrow, and you’ll have a motorcycle.

What you won’t automatically get is the community, friendships, traditions, and memories.

Harley didn’t just sell something to its customers.
It gave them somewhere to put part of their lives.

That’s much harder for a competitor to copy.

Most marketing budgets are built for sugar hits

Here’s where things go sideways.

Leaders say they want loyalty, trust, relationships, and lifetime value.
Then the budget meeting begins.
Suddenly everything has to move a number by next quarter.

So money flows toward things that generate immediate spikes. Another campaign. Another sponsorship. Another wave of paid media.

I call these brand sugar hits.

They work. And that’s the problem.
You get the rush. The chart jumps. Everybody feels productive.
Thirty days later, you need another one.

Meanwhile, the things that build lasting attachment have to justify themselves over and over again.

Product quality. Customer service. Community. Experienced employees. The distinctive features people have quietly built rituals around.

They might not make the prettiest chart next Tuesday.
But they might be why someone is still with you ten years from now.

You can tell your team attachment matters. Your budget tells them whether you actually mean it.

Put the Disappearance Test in the budget meeting

Before approving another marketing investment, ask three questions:

• Who would miss us if we disappeared tomorrow?

• What would they struggle to replace?

• What have they done that proves we matter to them?

Don’t accept “people love us.” Show me what they do. Show me actions.

Do they choose you when a competitor is cheaper? Bring friends? Fight to keep a favorite product or feature?

Those are receipts.

Now look at your budget. Are you investing in the reasons people stay? Or squeezing those things to pay for another campaign?

Here’s a suggestion.
At your next planning meeting, find one expense that buys a temporary spike.

Kill it.

Move the money into something customers would miss.

Then ask whether that investment becomes more valuable over time, or disappears the moment you stop paying for it.

Because the next marketing spike will always have an advocate.

What needs a stronger advocate is the thing your customers might still care about a decade from now.

If your brand vanished tomorrow, what would leave a scar?

And if you don’t have a good answer, maybe that’s where your next dollar should go.

Empower people. Connect communities. Democratize access. Improve lives. Build a better future.

All noble goals. They are also, conveniently, driven by verbs that point toward doing more: more customers, more markets, more products, and more top-line growth.

This shift is no longer just happening in retail or consumer goods. It has reached the highest stakes in modern tech and defense.

A Line Anthropic Drew

Anthropic recently found itself in an extraordinary standoff with the Pentagon.

While open to making its AI model, Claude, available for national security applications, the company drew two hard operational lines: its technology could not be used for mass domestic surveillance of Americans or for fully autonomous weapons systems. The Pentagon pushed back. Anthropic held its ground.

When a technology firm restricts or walks away from a defense procurement deal, it isn’t making a vague marketing claim. It is actively handing multi-million-dollar government contracts and immediate market share straight to competitors who have no such qualms.

Anthropic wasn’t saying, “We want AI to make the world better.” It was saying: Even if you are an enormous, high-value client, there are specific capabilities we will not deploy.

That is purpose with teeth.

It shifts purpose out of marketing collateral and firmly into governance, product policy, and contract law.

Aspiration Is Easy When Everyone Wins

The trouble with traditional purpose statements is that they rarely force a trade-off.

A commercial bank claims it exists to create economic opportunity.
A social network claims it exists to bring the world closer together.
A ride-share platform claims it exists to empower local movement.

Virtually any profitable business decision can eventually be reverse-engineered back into one of those broad ideas.

If your purpose cannot be audited by what you turned down, it isn’t strategy.
It’s just positioning.

When CVS stopped selling tobacco products across its pharmacies, it didn’t just launch an ad campaign; it walked away from an estimated $2 billion in annual revenue associated with tobacco shoppers. When Dick’s Sporting Goods stopped selling assault-style firearms and high-capacity magazines following the Parkland shooting, leadership knew a segment of their customer base would walk out the door forever.

Notice the structure of those decisions.

Not: Here is the world we hope to build.
But: Because we believe in our purpose, here is a profitable transaction we are no longer willing to make.

Purpose as Subtraction

We see this pattern emerging across global industries. The Guardian banned advertising from fossil fuel extraction companies despite relying heavily on ad revenue. BNP Paribas halted dedicated financing for new oil and gas field developments.

None of these companies are corporate saints, nor are these decisions immune to criticism. A brand can draw a meaningful line in one area while carrying obvious contradictions in another. The point isn’t to crown heroes. The point is to recognize a fundamental shift in how real purpose functions: not as a lofty promise, but as a rigid constraint.

→ “We won’t finance this.”
→ “We won’t sell this.”
→ “We won’t advertise this.”
→ “We won’t allow our platform to be used for this.”

A generic promise to “build a better world” is impossible to audit. An explicit refusal is not.

The Cost Is the Proof

Every enterprise already abides by basic baseline constraints: don’t violate the law, don’t sell to clients who can’t pay, and don’t intentionally destroy the business. Those aren’t purpose decisions; those are basic operational survival.

The meaningful refusals are the ones where the company could easily say yes. The customer is real. The revenue is legal and profitable. Mainstream culture wouldn’t even blink, because the behavior is industry standard.

And the company says no anyway. That cost is where the belief becomes visible.

The 5-Point Brand Constraint Test

1. Revenue: What legal money are you prepared not to earn?

2. Customers: Which profitable customer segment are you prepared to lose?

3. Products: What product or category will you deliberately refuse to launch?

4. Capabilities: What technical capability will you refuse to deploy?

5. Market Space: What legal, lucrative opportunity are you leaving on the table for someone else?

What Brands Refuse to Do

The next generation of meaningful brand storytelling may not begin with “We believe...” It may begin with “We will not...”

The most revealing question we can ask any company, brand, or executive team is no longer: What is your purpose?

It is: Tell me what your brand won’t do.

Forward this to your CMO, Chief Strategy Officer, or Product Lead today, and ask them: Which of these 5 constraints actually applies to us?

Partly because it costs less.

But mostly because it gets better with age.

The fabric softens. The colors fade. Repairs accumulate. A jacket develops a history. The best pieces don’t simply survive use. They absorb it.

A twenty-year-old fleece can be more interesting than a new one.

Which makes me wonder whether Patagonia’s next audacious strategic move isn’t about making something new at all.

Maybe it’s about dramatically increasing the useful life of everything it has already made.

That could be Patagonia’s next moonshot.

Patagonia already saw this coming

None of this starts from zero.

Patagonia has been pushing against disposable consumption for decades. It partnered with eBay through the Common Threads Initiative. It told customers to repair what they owned. It famously ran an ad telling people not to buy a new jacket.

Then it built Worn Wear, creating a system for taking products back, inspecting them, repairing them and putting them into circulation again.

That evolution matters.

There is a reason Patagonia brought more of this work in-house.

For Patagonia, resale isn’t simply a transaction. How a garment is collected matters. How it is washed matters. How it is repaired matters. How it is packaged and shipped matters. Every step is another opportunity to either reinforce or compromise the company’s environmental mission.

So the answer probably isn’t for Patagonia to outsource Worn Wear to eBay.

The more interesting question is:

What could Patagonia do outside Worn Wear that makes the entire secondary market work more like Worn Wear?

That is a much bigger opportunity.

The market is already moving

Secondhand apparel is no longer some fringe corner of retail.

ThredUp and GlobalData project the global secondhand apparel market will reach $393 billion by 2030, growing twice as fast as the overall apparel market.

In the U.S., resale grew at a staggering rate… nearly 4x faster than broader retail clothing in 2025.

And through 2030, 71 percent of secondhand market growth is projected to come from Gen Z and Millennials.

For Patagonia, that matters.

The secondary market may increasingly be where a younger customer first encounters the brand.

Not through a $519 new Storm Shift jacket.

Through a fifteen-year-old one.
Maybe on Worn Wear.
Maybe on eBay.
Maybe in a vintage store.
Maybe handed down by someone who no longer needs it.

The important thing isn’t where the transaction happens.
The important thing is that the jacket keeps moving.

Patagonia has fifty years of inventory

Patagonia reported roughly $1.47 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025. Worn Wear generated only a tiny fraction of that.

I initially looked at that gap and saw an underdeveloped business opportunity.
I think that gets the idea slightly wrong.
It’s not primarily about building a larger resale business.

It’s about building a larger system of recirculation.

Patagonia doesn’t need to own every Patagonia product in the secondary market. It doesn’t need to inspect every jacket or process every transaction.

What it can do is make every Patagonia product easier to identify, understand, repair, authenticate, maintain, and pass along.

Because Patagonia has something extraordinarily valuable that barely appears on a balance sheet:

Fifty years of inventory already out in the world.

Closets.
Garages.
Gear bins.
Vintage stores.
eBay listings.
Old duffel bags.

The company already made the stuff.
Now comes the question of how long it can keep that stuff useful.

Build around the gear already out there

Imagine pointing your phone at the tag on a twenty-year-old Patagonia jacket.

Patagonia identifies the model and year.
The original specifications appear.
So do care instructions.
Repair information.
Replacement parts.
Perhaps the original catalog page.

Maybe you see which fabrics were used and what environmental standards existed when the product was made.

If the tag is gone, image recognition takes a shot.

Collectors and longtime Patagonia customers could help fill in gaps in the archive, identifying obscure colorways, forgotten models and unusual product generations.

Repairs become part of the product history rather than something that diminishes its value.

A patched jacket isn’t worth less because it has been repaired.
Maybe it becomes more interesting because you can see where it has been.

Would you rather own the jacket that’s been somewhere, or the one that’s only been on a rack?

Patagonia could develop standards for condition.
Better methods for authentication.
Tools that make listing an old product easier.
Connections between sellers and repair services.
And Worn Wear could remain the highest-control expression of the system without needing to become the only one.

That distinction matters.

The purpose isn’t to funnel every transaction through Patagonia.
It is to keep the product in use.

From customer lifetime value to product lifetime value

Most businesses obsess over customer lifetime value.
How much revenue can we generate from this person over the course of the relationship?

Patagonia is unusually positioned to think about something different:

Product lifetime value.

One jacket.
Four owners.
Thirty years.
Three repairs.
Thousands of days outside.
Four opportunities for someone to enter into a relationship with Patagonia.

A product could move from person to person without ever completely leaving Patagonia’s ecosystem.

Buy an old shell on eBay and register it.
Patagonia tells you what you bought.
It helps you repair it.
It sends you the right zipper pull.
Maybe it connects you to a local repair event.
Maybe it invites you into an environmental campaign happening where you live.

The second owner doesn’t have to represent a lost new-product sale.
Neither does the third.

Their existence can be proof that the product did exactly what Patagonia designed it to do.

That turns durability from a product attribute into an environmental strategy.

Measure life, not just footprint

Most corporate environmental goals measure what happens while a product is being made.

Carbon. Water. Energy. Materials. Packaging.
All of that matters enormously.

But what happens after the product is made matters too.
Imagine Patagonia publishing another number alongside those environmental metrics:

Average years in active use.

Or the percentage of products reaching a second owner.
The percentage repaired rather than replaced.
The number of additional years added through repair.
The number of used Patagonia products recirculated annually, whether or not Patagonia handled the transaction.

Suddenly product longevity becomes something the company can measure, manage and improve.

And the target could be ridiculous.
Patagonia likes ridiculous targets.
What if it set out to double the average useful life of a Patagonia product over the next decade?
Or make repairing and recirculating an existing Patagonia product easier than replacing it with a new one?
Or eventually generate more environmental benefit by extending the lives of existing products than by improving the footprint of the next generation of products?

The exact metric can be debated.
The strategic direction is harder to argue with.

eBay still matters

This is where eBay becomes interesting again, just in a different role.

Patagonia and eBay have worked together before.

They don’t need to recreate that partnership or turn eBay into Worn Wear.

But eBay is already one of the world’s largest pieces of infrastructure for keeping physical things moving from one person to another.

And enormous amounts of Patagonia are already there.

So experiment.

Make Patagonia products unusually easy to identify and list.
Connect eBay listings to Patagonia’s product archive.
Explore repair-before-resale.
Experiment with authenticated product histories.
See what increases circulation.
See what keeps garments in use longer.

Or take money out of the equation altogether

Patagonia could experiment with the barter economy at scale. Once a month, turn the parking lots outside its stores into gear swaps. Bring a jacket. Leave with a pack. Trade a fleece for a pair of board shorts. The surf community has done versions of this forever with boards and gear. Why couldn’t Patagonia help make swapping as normal as buying used?

And it doesn’t have to happen in a parking lot. Patagonia could experiment with digital swaps, local exchanges or tools that simply help two people find each other and trade.

The mechanism matters less than the movement.

If a twenty-year-old jacket goes from someone who no longer uses it to someone who will, the system worked.

Then do the same wherever else Patagonia products move.

The objective isn’t more Patagonia on eBay.
It’s more years of use from Patagonia products everywhere.

Then give the playbook away

And this is where the idea could become much bigger than Patagonia.

The real environmental opportunity isn’t simply getting someone to buy a used Patagonia jacket instead of a new Patagonia jacket.

It’s getting millions of people to consider used first.

So Patagonia should treat itself as the laboratory.
Figure out how product identification works.
Figure out how repair affects resale value.
Figure out how brands can maintain useful product histories for decades.
Figure out how to make resale easier without suffocating peer-to-peer markets.
Figure out which interventions actually extend product life.

Measure everything.

Then publish the results.

Invite The North Face in.
Levi’s.
Nike.
Arc’teryx.
Carhartt.

Give them the tools.
Patagonia has done versions of this before.

It helped create One Percent for the Planet. It helped build the Sustainable Apparel Coalition. It has shared environmental supply-chain lessons rather than treating every improvement as proprietary advantage.

Because the point was never simply to make Patagonia better.
Or even to change business.
The point is right there in it’s mission statement → to save our home planet.

It’s not about the stuff

It’s not about the stuff; it’s about the planet.

There is a temptation when looking at Patagonia to focus on the jackets.

The fleece.
The packs.
The board shorts.
The iconic old pieces people collect and trade.

But the deeper idea behind Patagonia has never really been the stuff.

It is the planet.

The stuff is an intervention.

The company makes products, invests in companies, gives away money, experiments with food, supports environmental organizations and changes supply chains because those are different ways to push on the same problem.

Product longevity belongs on that list.

Patagonia jackets are being worn today that were manufactured before some of the people wearing them were born.

That is extraordinary.

Most brands spend enormous amounts of money trying to manufacture relevance every season.

Patagonia has decades of relevance sitting in closets, garages, gear bags and resale listings around the world.

It already made the hard part.
It made things worth keeping.
The next challenge is helping us keep them.
Repair them.
Understand them.
Pass them along.
And keep them moving for as long as possible.

Patagonia’s next moonshot doesn’t have to be another billion dollars of product.

It could be ten more years from millions of products Patagonia has already made.

Make the useful life of the products Patagonia has already made as important an environmental metric as the footprint of the products it makes next.

Then show the rest of the industry how to do it.

I’m not.

I’m a customer of fire.

For years, I thought the basic transaction of the internet was simple. Platforms gave me information and entertainment. In return, they sold my attention to advertisers.

That is still true.
But increasingly, I think they are selling something to me, too.

Outrage. Certainty. Conflict. The irresistible feeling that someone else is wrong and I can see it clearly.

Not information designed to inform me. Content designed to ignite me.

They are selling arson.
And I keep buying.

The incentives are not difficult to understand.

Boring doesn’t sell.

“It’s complicated” is a painfully dull headline.

“I can see both sides” doesn’t build much of a personal brand.

“I’m not sure yet” has zero chance of going viral.

Nuance is slow. Uncertainty is unsatisfying. The reasonable middle is, by definition, not particularly provocative.

The edges have an advantage.

Certainty performs better than complexity.
Conflict travels farther than consensus.
Outrage monetizes much better than moderation.

So the market makes things hotter.

People who want attention learn to sharpen their positions. Platforms learn which subjects keep us watching. Algorithms learn what makes us stop, click, comment, and share.

There is enormous money in capturing and holding our attention. Joe Rogan’s latest Spotify deal was reported to be worth as much as $250 million. Whatever you think of Rogan, that is a staggering valuation for one person’s ability to hold attention.

You do not necessarily have to lie.
You just have to be notably more interesting than the next person, and one easy way to do that is to become more certain.

More provocative.
More extreme.
Turn up the heat.

Here’s the part I find harder to admit.

I understand how this works.

I have spent much of my career thinking about brands, media, attention, business models, and human behavior.

I know that platforms reward engagement.
I know that algorithms learn from behavior.
I know all of this.

And I still fall for it.

I click on the headline I know was written to activate me.
I linger on the thing that makes me feel something.
I share what feels white-hot, not necessarily what is most useful or true.
I return to voices that sound certain, even when I know the world rarely is.

Sometimes I click on something I already know I’m going to disagree with.

Why?

I’m human. And that little hit feels nice.

I’d like to think my understanding of the system makes me immune to it.
Instead, it’s only made me a more self-aware accelerant.
That is the part we tend to miss when we talk about what has happened to media.

We blame everything else but rarely see our place in the equation.

It’s those manipulative algorithms.
Evil platforms.
Deliberately provocative podcasters.
Outrage-driven cable news channels.
Desperate, attention-seeking influencers.
Opportunistic politicians.

We point to whoever is holding the match.
But the business model does not work without customers.
When I click because I am outraged, I signal value.

Anything I give my attention to is a money maker for someone else.

When I watch because I cannot believe what someone is saying, I create demand.
When I share something because it is sharp rather than useful, I become distribution.

The system learns.

The next thing gets a little sharper.

A little louder.
A little hotter.
And then I click again.

Some things deserve outrage. Some institutions deserve attack. Some moments require people willing to say what others will not.

The problem is that the market cannot distinguish moral urgency from profitable agitation.

It does not know the difference between intensity that matters and intensity that merely performs.

It only sees the response.

A thoughtful person saying, “There are legitimate arguments on both sides,” begins at a structural disadvantage to the person saying, “Everything you have been told is a lie.”

One may be a more accurate representation of reality.
The other is more likely to make me click.

That may be the most uncomfortable realization of all.
The people setting the fires are not operating independently of me.

They are responding to me.

To what I click.
What I watch.
What I share.
What I return for.

The incentives pull people toward the edges because I keep rewarding them when they go there.

Through me.

The internet has given me extraordinary access to information. More voices. More perspectives. More independence from traditional gatekeepers.

That is real.

It has also given me the ability to consume almost anything I want, whenever I want, with almost no friction.

And given that freedom, I am not sure I consistently choose better.

I choose easier.
Faster.
More stimulating.
I choose the thing that confirms what I already suspect.

The internet did not invent our appetite for outrage.
It industrialized it, measured it, and learned how to sell it back to us.

We are not merely victims of the attention economy.
We are its customers.

The arsonists bring the match.
The platforms build the marketplace.

But every click is a purchase.
And I keep buying.

Spanish flags were draped over shoulders, painted onto faces, and carried into nearly every corner of the room. I was casually supporting Argentina, but not strongly enough to disappear into my own side. That gave me the odd privilege of watching a tribe form from just outside it.

What struck me was not simply how strongly people supported Spain. It was how urgently that support wanted to become visible.

Belief, it seems, wants a body.

Watch almost any major sporting event and eventually the camera will find one.

A fan whose face is painted in team colors. A shirtless college student whose chest has become a flag. A child wearing the colors of a country they have never visited. A grown adult who, for a few hours, has willingly transformed into a living banner.

These moments may be harmless fun, but they also reveal something much older than sports.

Humans have always marked themselves, sometimes literally with paint.

Long before logos, we covered our bodies with pigments to prepare for battle, mark a ceremony, honor the dead, celebrate a harvest, or declare allegiance to a tribe.

The paint was not decoration.
It was communication.
Before you spoke, people knew who you were, who you stood with, and perhaps who you stood against.

Thousands of years later, the paint has changed.

Today, we paint ourselves with symbols.
We do not just wear these things.
We wear ourselves through them.

The pattern is familiar.

We believe something.
Then we display it.
Then our identity with it deepens.
Eventually, other people begin identifying us by it.

That question feels especially relevant now because we live in a culture that increasingly treats visibility as proof of sincerity.

If a belief matters, we are expected to wear it, post it, signal it, and make it recognizable to strangers. It is no longer enough to care privately. Belief must be made public. Allegiance must be legible.

Symbols make that possible. They compress an entire story into something another person can read from across a room or in the fraction of a second it takes to scroll past a post.

But compression comes at a cost.

The more clearly a symbol tells others who we are, the more difficult it can become to be anything else.

Belonging is one of our deepest needs. For most of human history, being part of a group meant protection, food, and a future. Being alone often meant the opposite.

Centuries later… we still look for signals that answer ancient questions:
Who is with me?
Who understands me?
Where do I belong?

Today, those signals do more than help us find one another.
They also help systems sort us.

The identities we display influence what we are shown next. Platforms return people, arguments, products, and stories that resemble what we have already signaled. The symbols we elevate are fuel to algorithms. We express an identity, the culture reflects it back, and the reflection gradually becomes more complete than the person who created it.

We are not just choosing identities.
We are increasingly being sorted into them, rewarded for displaying them, and shown more people who display them the same way.

A culture built around signaling does not merely reveal identity. It can harden it.

Nuance is difficult to display. Uncertainty does not travel well. Complication is harder to recognize than a flag, a slogan, a logo, or a color.

So the symbols get louder.

The hat gets brighter.
The slogan gets repeated more often.
The flag gets bigger, until it is flying from the back of a truck.

Not necessarily because belief has grown stronger, but because it feels increasingly necessary to prove it.

The more visibly we perform an identity, the more pressure we feel to remain consistent with it. Other people begin expecting certain opinions from us. Our group rewards some reactions and punishes others.

Our world becomes smaller and more insular.

Changing our minds begins to look less like growth and more like betrayal.

That may be why criticism of a symbol can feel so personal.

If I merely support a football team, losing is disappointing. If being a fan has become central to who I am, criticism lands much differently.

The same pattern appears in politics, religion, brands, professions, countries, and social movements.

Belonging can quietly turn into tribalism when the symbol stops expressing identity and starts policing it.

The problem is not that the symbol changed.
The relationship to the symbol did.

There is an important difference between saying, “This represents something I value,” and saying, “This is who I am.”

The first leaves room for curiosity.
The second leaves very little room to change.

None of this means symbols are bad. Shared symbols help strangers become communities. They create rituals, traditions, and moments of collective joy. They remind us that we are part of something larger than ourselves.

The question is not whether we should belong.
It is whether belonging still leaves us free.

Which of my identities are chosen?
Which have been strengthened because the world keeps reflecting them back to me?
Which could I change tomorrow without feeling that I had lost part of myself?
And which ideas do I still hold freely, rather than needing them to hold me together?

The next time the camera cuts to a fan whose face is covered in paint, pause for a moment.

That paint is not just team spirit. It is one of humanity’s oldest instincts hiding in plain sight: the desire to make belief visible, belonging legible, and an idea part of who we are.

We all paint our faces somehow.

Perhaps the real measure of an identity is not how proudly we wear it, but whether we remain free to take it off.

I can think of a hundred things I’ve stopped questioning. Airport security. Hospital waiting rooms. DMV lines. Automated phone trees. Passwords.

We learn the rules and lower our expectations.

Let’s call it what it is:
We give up.

That’s why I’m kinda smitten with an idea from Siemens connected to one of the more imposing pieces of medical technology: the MRI machine.

MRI machines are loud. Really loud. Drive-you-crazy loud. Click below and listen for 10 seconds. You’ll feel the pressure mounting.

Now imagine you’re a kid already dealing with the fear and uncertainty of cancer treatment.

Thank goodness someone at Siemens looked at what everyone else had accepted and asked: What if the worst part of the experience could become part of something better?

Magnetic Stories turns the knocks, hums and mechanical rhythms of an MRI into part of a children’s story.

So simple. So brilliant.

It didn’t require reinventing the MRI. It required refusing to accept that fear was simply part of using one.

And I think there’s a bigger lesson here for brands.

I’ve spent decades thinking about what separates brand citizenship from good marketing. I keep coming back to something pretty simple → companies should take some responsibility for the human consequences surrounding what they make, even when those consequences aren’t technically their fault.

The human experience is the product experience.

Companies tend to draw clean lines around responsibility. We make the machine. We sell the product. We provide the service. Everything around that? Not our problem.

Except people experience the whole thing.

A child doesn’t separate the medical value of an MRI from the fear of lying inside one. A customer doesn’t separate a great product from terrible service. An employee doesn’t separate what a company says from what it feels like to work there.

Sometimes the most meaningful thing a brand can do is take responsibility for the part everyone else has learned to tolerate.

That’s what I can’t stop thinking about with Magnetic Stories.
It isn’t really a story about advertising or technology.

It’s a story about noticing.

MRI technology has been around for more than 50 years. For decades, the noise was simply part of the deal. How many kids were terrified by it before someone finally asked whether that part of the experience could be better?

Familiarity has a strange way of making problems invisible.

Eventually, “this is how it works” becomes one of the strongest defenses against changing anything.
The best innovation often begins by questioning that sentence.

So, a quick attaboy to Siemens. Not because Magnetic Stories is going to change healthcare, but because someone looked at a problem everyone had learned to live with and said:

This part, at least this little part right here, can be better.

Not every act of brand citizenship requires taking a stand on a hot-button social issue. Sometimes, brand citizenship is as simple as refusing to let your customer suffer through a process you built.

Look at what your company makes. Look at the experience surrounding it. Look at what people have simply learned to accept.

Then ask: Does it have to be this way?

That may be where the next big idea is hiding.

Our culture is obsessed with creation. The new product. The new company. The new technology. The next version.

AI has put that instinct into overdrive. We can now generate images, software, strategies, songs, and ideas almost instantaneously. Creation has never been easier.

But increasingly, the things around us are not designed to be understood, repaired, or maintained by the people who use them.

They are designed to be replaced.

My 1963 Land Rover suggests another way.

The Magic and the Machine

The specific model wasn’t just everywhere. For much of the world, it was the first vehicle people ever saw.

It wasn’t designed to be replaced. It was designed to endure.

There is no black box. Every mechanical heartbeat can be felt through the floorboards. Every intention is translated through visible linkages and heavy steel bolts.

When something breaks, you can usually see it.
And, with a little knowledge and the right wrench—or a needle and thread, or a simple screwdriver—you can probably fix it.

That feels increasingly radical.

In his latest work, Maintenance, systems thinker Stewart Brand argues that our culture is obsessed with innovation and the flash of the new. We tend to think of sustainability as an aspirational end state, something to achieve.

But Brand shifts the lens:

Sustainability isn’t something you reach.
It’s something you do.

Daily. Monthly. Yearly. For decades.

I absolutely love this slightly unexpected way of thinking about sustainability. Not as an aspiration, but as an ongoing act of care.

It is the act of keeping things running.

We’ve been taught to measure sustainability by footprint. But another question may be just as important:

How long does the thing last?

The Aspiration of the Unbroken

We have been conditioned to believe that value is tied to the latest version.
We upgrade. We replace. We move on.

My Land Rover suggests something different.
A thing is not necessarily most valuable when it is new. There is another kind of value that can only be earned over time.

The value of having lasted.

The dents, repairs, replacement parts, and worn surfaces aren’t evidence that something has failed. They are evidence that it has survived.

There is an aspiration embedded in that idea that feels increasingly absent from modern design:

Make something worth keeping. Then make it possible to keep it.

The Ethics of Care

There is a distinct ethics of care involved in keeping a 60-year-old machine alive—whether it’s a truck, a mechanical watch, or a cast-iron skillet—that doesn’t exist with a modern smartphone.

The invitation to intervene. Modern technology increasingly locks us out. Proprietary screws. Sealed systems. Black boxes. The Land Rover invites you in. It was built to be understood by the person who steers it.

The stewardship of the old. When I fix a leak or tighten a belt, I am participating in the car’s survival. There is a real joy in maintaining something decades old. You develop a relationship with an object by learning its needs and peculiarities.

The rejection of obsolescence. Maintenance is a quiet rebellion against a world that wants you to throw things away. There’s a bit of punk rock in it, a DIY refusal to replace what can be repaired.

Simplicity is not primitive.
Sometimes, simplicity is what makes something resilient.

This Isn’t Really About Old Cars

It’s about the changing relationship between people and the things around us.
Cars. Appliances. Phones. Software. Buildings. Institutions.

Increasingly, we are surrounded by things we can use but cannot understand, repair, or maintain. When they stop working, our role is simple:

Replace them.

Something is lost in that transaction beyond sustainability.
We lose agency.
We stop being stewards and become consumers.

The more powerful our technology becomes, the less agency we have in maintaining it.

That is where AI becomes an interesting part of this story.

Not because a 1963 Land Rover and artificial intelligence have much in common. They don’t.

But they represent two very different relationships with technology.

When an AI hallucinates, you can’t open the hood to see why. There is no loose wire to jiggle or bolt to tighten. The error is buried somewhere inside billions of invisible parameters and weighting systems.

When my Land Rover stalls, the problem is physical and, at least in theory, solvable.

There is something reassuring in that. The machine reminds you that you are still capable of understanding and fixing a small piece of your own world.

What Deserves to Last?

I say this as someone who loves technology.

I helped build an AI company more than two decades ago that still operates today. I marvel at what this new generation of technology is making possible.

I don’t want less innovation.

But our obsession with innovation has caused us to undervalue its quieter counterpart.

Maintenance.

Innovation asks: What can we make?
Maintenance asks: What deserves to last?

We need both.

Because if AI is going to accelerate the creation of everything, an increasingly important question is who will be responsible for keeping any of it?

And maybe that applies to more than machines.
Companies. Communities. Institutions. Relationships. Ideas.

The things that matter most rarely survive simply because someone created them.
They survive because someone decided they were worth caring for.

My 1963 Land Rover is one of the oldest things I own. I used to think of that as a testament to the people who built it.

Now I think it may be equally a testament to everyone who came after.
Everyone who fixed something.
And decided, one more time, not to throw it away.

In a culture obsessed with making the next thing, perhaps there is something quietly radical about deciding that something already here is worth keeping.

P.S. Huge thanks to Anthony De La Fuente for guiding my interest, confidence, and tool selection along this journey.

The stores aren’t beautiful.
The logo isn’t iconic.
The shopping experience is crowded.
The signage is purely functional.
There are forklifts in the aisles, pallets stacked to the ceiling, and almost no sense of theater.

If branding were mostly about perception, Costco shouldn’t work.
Instead, it’s one of the most admired, trusted, and successful companies in America.

Which raises a more interesting question.
What if we’ve been teaching branding backwards?

Modern branding has become remarkably focused on perception.

→ Purpose
→ Storytelling
→ Distinctive assets
→ Emotional connection
→ Brand experience
→ Social media

Cultural relevance.

None of those things are unimportant.
But Costco suggests they aren’t where trust begins.

Maybe branding isn’t primarily about shaping perception.
Maybe it’s about creating evidence.

Costco didn’t build its reputation through advertising.
It built it through decisions.

A cap on markups.
Membership economics.
A deliberately limited assortment.
Industry-leading employee wages.
An unusually generous return policy.
Products quietly disappearing when they no longer deserve shelf space.

None of those decisions were made to make Costco look trustworthy.
They were made to make Costco operate consistently.

Trust became the byproduct.

Costco’s operating model IS its brand strategy.

This is where branding gets interesting.

Most companies assume trust creates a better operation.
Costco suggests the opposite.

Better business creates trust.
Every decision reinforces the same promise.
“We’re trying to make a fair deal on your behalf.”

Customers may never consciously think those words.
They feel them.
Over time, those experiences accumulate.
One visit doesn’t create trust.
Hundreds of consistent decisions do.
Eventually, customers stop evaluating individual purchases.

They begin trusting the system itself.

The institution becomes the shortcut.
That’s one of the strongest competitive advantages any company can build.
Not because it’s emotional.
Because it’s cumulative.

This changes how we should think about branding.

Marketing introduces the promise.
Operations keep it.
Culture repeats it.
Governance protects it.

You can see this everywhere once you start looking.

Apple expresses its values through product design.
Patagonia expresses them through ownership.
Trader Joe’s expresses them through merchandising.
Costco expresses them through operational discipline.

Different companies.
Different strategies.

Same principle.

The strongest brands aren’t built one campaign at a time.
They’re built one decision at a time.

None of these companies earned trust primarily through communications.

They earned trust through thousands of decisions that consistently reinforced the same promise.

For years we’ve talked about brands as though they’re something a company creates.

Maybe they’re something a company earns.
Not through campaigns.
Through consistency.

Not through messaging.
Through decisions.
Thousands of them.
Repeated over years.
Visible or invisible.
Every one becoming another piece of evidence.

Maybe that’s why Costco feels so unusual.
It isn’t asking customers to admire it.
It’s asking them to rely on it.

Those are very different relationships.

One creates attention.
The other compounds into trust.

And trust may be the most valuable brand asset of all.

Because while stories may earn attention, people don’t ultimately trust stories.
They trust systems that consistently keep promises.

Maybe the future of branding isn’t telling a better story.
Maybe it’s building a better system.

It was brilliant.
It was inspiring.
And it was only half the story.

Because not every disruption is progress.

Apple didn’t invent America’s fascination with rebels. It simply gave voice to something much older.

We’ve been romanticizing disruption for about 250 years.

America was born in rebellion. We celebrate founders, pioneers, entrepreneurs, activists, inventors, and outsiders because challenging the status quo is woven into our national story. From the Revolution to Silicon Valley, we’ve admired the people willing to say, “The system is broken.”

For much of our history, that instinct served us well.
But somewhere along the way, something changed.

We stopped treating disruption as a means.
We started treating it as a virtue.

It is one of the most consequential cultural shifts of our generation.

Because here is the strangest thing:

Nobody hangs posters of bridge inspectors.
No commencement speech celebrates the engineer who quietly makes commercial aviation safer.
No blockbuster follows the people updating electrical standards, improving accounting rules, or spending thirty years making medicine more reliable.

Yet civilization depends on those people every bit as much as it depends on founders.

Building institutions is slow.
Criticizing them is effortless.
Destroying trust takes minutes.
Building it usually takes decades.

Institutions deserve criticism. Some deserve to disappear. But they’re also why airplanes full of strangers land safely every day, why your bank balance still exists tomorrow morning, and why knowledge accumulates instead of restarting every generation.

They’re imperfect.
They’re also civilization’s operating system.

When disruption becomes the highest virtue, every institution eventually becomes the villain.
And when every institution becomes the villain, all that’s left is personality, attention, and spectacle.

We’re already living through the consequences.

Business increasingly revolves around founders.
Media revolves around personalities.
Politics revolves around individuals.

Artificial intelligence may become the biggest test yet—not because it can dismantle institutions, but because we’ll soon have to decide which new ones deserve our trust.

For decades the dominant story has been simple:

Move fast → Break things → Challenge authority → Think Different

To be fair, much of that disruption improved the world.

But disruption answers only one question:

What are you willing to tear down?

Civilization asks another:

What are you willing to build that people will still trust fifty years from now?

Apple captured the romance of disruption.
What it left out was responsibility.
Every generation needs rebels.
But cultures become what they celebrate.

If we celebrate only disruption, we’ll produce more disruption.
If we celebrate builders, we’ll produce more builders.

History remembers the revolution.

Civilization relies on the people who show up the next morning.

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Think about the normal world.

Military power is asymmetric.
Economic power is asymmetric.
Technology power is asymmetric.

The United States, China, and a handful of others occupy a different universe than most nations.

If Luxembourg dislikes American trade policy, that’s unfortunate.
If Costa Rica disagrees with China, that’s unfortunate too.

The world is not a level playing field.
It never has been.

Yet every four years something strange happens.

Croatia can eliminate Brazil.
Morocco can shock Spain.
Iceland can become a global story.
Uruguay can matter.

A country with four million people can command more global attention than countries fifty times its size.

For a brief moment, population, GDP, military strength, and geopolitical leverage become secondary.

The scoreboard doesn’t care.

Everybody starts at 0-0.

That’s why the World Cup feels different from almost every other international institution.

The United Nations doesn’t reward performance.
The global economy doesn’t reward performance evenly.
Military influence certainly doesn’t.

To be clear, FIFA itself is hardly immune from politics, influence, or corruption.
But once play begins, those forces become surprisingly weak predictors of outcome.

The World Cup is one of the few global stages where small countries can actually win.
Or at least compete.

And that reveals something.

What you’re really watching isn’t national power.
You’re watching national capability.

Those are different things.

Power is what a country has.
Capability is what a country can repeatedly produce.

Capability is the ability to repeatedly produce excellence.
Not once.
Not accidentally.
Repeatedly.

If the tournament simply measured resources, the same countries would win every time.
They don’t.

The World Cup is a test of production.

→ Can you develop talent?
→ Can you build institutions?
→ Can you identify potential?
→ Can you create trust?
→ Can you align individuals around something larger than themselves?
→ Can you sustain excellence across generations?

Those questions sound like sports questions.

They’re actually civilization questions.

Every nation quietly asks different things of its people.
Every nation produces different habits.

Some systems reward conformity.
Others reward improvisation.
Some emphasize collective discipline.
Others individual initiative.

Different societies produce talent differently.

The World Cup doesn’t tell us which model is best.
It reveals what each model can produce.

Different assumptions.
Different forms of social trust.
Different relationships to authority.
Different relationships to risk.
Different definitions of success.

Most of the time those things are invisible.

Then eleven players walk onto a field and somehow those invisible systems become visible.

Not because the players represent stereotypes.
Because they represent outputs.

The team is not the country.
The team is evidence of the country.

The Olympics partially does this.
But the Olympics is fragmented across dozens of sports.

The World Cup is different.

The entire world is looking at one game.

One scoreboard.
One standard.

One question:
Can your system produce excellence under pressure?

And maybe that’s why billions watch.

Not because they care about soccer.
Most people don’t.

They care because the tournament answers a question nations rarely get asked directly:

What can your society actually produce?

Not what does it promise.
Not what does it claim.
Not what does it post on social media.

Produce.

For one month, every nation gets measured by the same instrument.

The scoreboard doesn’t care.

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Part 1 → AI Is Changing the Deal (and No One Agreed to It)
Part 2 → When AI Wins, Who Wins?

Most of modern life runs on a quiet assumption:

Somebody is steering.

Maybe it’s the company. Maybe it’s the regulator. Maybe it’s the board, the courts, or the government. We may not know exactly who is in charge, but we tend to believe someone, somewhere, understands the system well enough to intervene when necessary.

That belief matters more than we realize.

We board airplanes we cannot build. We take medicine we cannot formulate. We trust financial systems we do not fully understand. We participate in increasingly complex digital platforms because we assume there are rules, oversight, and accountability structures surrounding them.

The assumption has never been perfect.
And AI is beginning to test it more than we may realize.

In the first piece in this series, I wrote about the Permission Gap: the space between what companies are technically capable of doing and what people believe they have the right to do.

In the second, I wrote about the Extraction Zone: what happens when value created by many increasingly flows to a small number of owners.

This third piece is about what comes next.
The Control Gap.

The Control Gap is the space between the power of these systems and our ability to meaningfully govern them.

And right now, that gap is widening.

Most governance systems were built for a slower world. Quarterly reviews. Annual planning cycles. Regulatory processes measured in years. They were designed for products and institutions that changed slowly enough to be observed, understood, and challenged.

AI doesn’t operate on that timeline.

Models evolve continuously. Capabilities emerge unexpectedly. Products change faster than institutions can evaluate them. By the time a committee reviews the risks, the system may already be different than the one they intended to govern.

That is not oversight.

It is delayed observation.

This is why the challenge is deeper than regulation.

The issue isn’t simply whether we have the right rules. The issue is whether the people responsible for governing these systems can understand them quickly enough to remain credible.

Because control is not ultimately about authority.

It’s about understanding.

We tend to assume those two things are the same. Historically, they often were. The people making decisions generally had a reasonable understanding of the systems they controlled. If something went wrong, someone could explain what happened. Someone could be held accountable.

AI introduces a different possibility.

What happens when authority and understanding begin to separate?

What happens when the people approving a system don’t fully understand it, the people affected by it can’t inspect it, and even the people building it cannot always explain why it produced a particular result?

That changes the nature of accountability itself.

Increasingly, AI-influenced systems are helping shape decisions about employment, credit, insurance, pricing, visibility, reputation, and access to information. In many cases, the people affected by those decisions have little ability to understand how they were made.

And when people cannot see a system, question it, challenge it, or stop it, trust begins to change.

Not disappear.

Change.

Trust becomes less about accountability and more about faith.

Faith that the system is working.
Faith that someone understands it.
Faith that somebody is still steering.

That’s a fragile foundation.

I’ve sat in rooms where smart, responsible leaders discuss AI governance frameworks while admitting they do not fully understand how AI is already being used inside their own organizations. This isn’t a story about negligence. In many cases, it’s the opposite. People are trying their best to govern responsibly.

The problem is velocity.

The systems are moving faster than the structures surrounding them.

And that tension is becoming normal.

That’s what concerns me.

Because power does not become legitimate simply because it becomes familiar.

The most significant risks rarely arrive all at once. They become embedded gradually. First a technology is useful. Then it becomes convenient. Then it becomes essential. Eventually it becomes difficult to imagine functioning without it.

The same pattern appeared in the Permission Gap.

The same pattern appeared in the Extraction Zone.

→ First convenience
→ Then dependence
→ Then opacity

By the time people begin asking harder questions, the system is already woven into everyday life.

To be clear, this is not an argument against AI.

AI will improve countless things. It will accelerate research, increase productivity, unlock creativity, and solve problems that are difficult to solve today.

The question is not whether the technology works.

The question is whether the systems gaining power remain governable.

Can they be explained?
Can they be challenged?
Can responsibility be assigned when something goes wrong?
Can meaningful human accountability survive at machine speed?

Those are governance questions.

Those are legitimacy questions.

And legitimacy matters because institutions ultimately run on trust. People do not expect perfection. They do not require every decision to be correct. But they do expect a path to explanation, correction, and accountability.

Without that, trust doesn’t simply decline.

It changes category.

It becomes blind faith.

And blind faith is not a durable foundation for markets, governments, corporations, or democratic societies.

This is the real risk of the Control Gap.

Not machine consciousness.
Not killer robots.
Not the science-fiction scenarios that dominate headlines.

The more immediate risk is that more and more people look at the systems shaping their lives and conclude that no one is meaningfully steering them.

Not the companies.
Not the regulators.
Not the governments.
Not even, fully, the builders.

At that point, the crisis is no longer technological.

It becomes institutional.

A system can become more powerful without becoming more governable.

A company can become more capable without becoming more accountable.

A society can become more technologically advanced while feeling less in control of its own direction.

That is the future we should be paying attention to.

Not because the technology will stop.

It won’t.

But because legitimacy has to keep pace with power.

And if no one can meaningfully explain the system, no one can meaningfully govern it.

Which leaves us with the question this series has been circling from the beginning:

If the deal has changed, if the value is being redistributed, and if the systems are moving faster than our ability to govern them...

Who is actually in control?

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The environmental sector does not have a passion problem.

It has a focus problem.

We have world-class scientists, urgent missions, extraordinary commitment, and fifty years of public awareness behind us. Climate change is no longer a fringe issue. Biodiversity loss is no longer abstract. Nearly every major institution on earth now acknowledges environmental instability as one of the defining challenges of the century.

And yet many environmental organizations still struggle to create momentum at the scale the moment demands.

I’ve spent my career inside this world in a dozen different ways. I’ve run organizations, advised some of the oldest environmental institutions in the country, and helped newer ones find their footing.

Across almost every vantage point, I see the same pattern.

We mistake interconnectedness for strategy.

Environmentalism attracts systems thinkers. That’s one of our strengths.

We understand that watersheds connect to housing. Housing connects to density. Density connects to transportation. Transportation connects to emissions.

That distinction matters more than many organizations want to admit.

Because once everything becomes connected to everything else, prioritization starts to feel morally uncomfortable. Saying no to adjacent issues can feel irresponsible. Narrowing scope can feel reductive. Focus can even feel politically risky.

So organizations expand.

Programs multiply.
Messaging broadens.
Partnerships stack.
Internal complexity grows.

And slowly, energy disperses across an ever-expanding surface area.

In business, lack of focus kills companies quickly.

In nonprofits, it kills impact slowly.

Which makes it harder to detect and easier to rationalize.

The environmental sector is trying to solve civilization-scale problems while competing for limited attention, funding, and political capital.

That reality makes focus even more important, not less.

One of the hardest capabilities for environmental organizations to build is the discipline of tradeoffs.

Most people in this sector did not arrive here because they enjoy saying no.

They arrived because they care deeply.

About forests.
Oceans.
Wildlife.
Communities.
Justice.
Science.
Future generations.

But organizations do not scale through conviction alone.

They scale through exclusion.

Every serious institution is ultimately defined not only by what it funds, but by what it refuses to fund.

I’ve watched organizations slowly become reflections of their funding mix rather than their original reason for existing.

Not because anyone was malicious.
Because survival incentives are powerful.
And because in the nonprofit world, breadth is often rewarded before effectiveness.

I’ve known plenty of companies that disappeared because they lost focus.
I’ve known far fewer nonprofits that disappeared.

Most simply became less effective versions of themselves.
That is a far more dangerous failure mode.

The environment is never “saved.”
It is always being saved.
Which means environmental organizations cannot afford to confuse expansion with effectiveness.

The future likely belongs to organizations that are narrower, sharper, and more willing to disappoint people in the short term in order to achieve something meaningful in the long term.

Because urgency without tradeoffs is just rhetoric.
Strategy ultimately becomes the discipline of saying no.

So here is the harder question:

If your organization could only solve one environmental problem over the next twenty years, what would you stop doing tomorrow?

And would your funding model survive the answer?

In strategy sessions, the moment Patagonia gets mentioned, the response is almost predictable:

“We’re not Patagonia.”

I’ve heard it from smart teams. Serious operators.
I’ve said versions of it myself.

On the surface, it sounds like leadership.
Measured. Practical. Grounded in reality.

But over time, I’ve come to see it differently.

It sounds like a statement of fact.
Really, it’s a permission slip to stop trying.

Not all at once. Just enough to make the safer decision.
The one that fits inside the quarter.

That’s how brand irrelevance leaks.

I think of that pattern as an irrelevance tax.
Not something you see.
Something you accumulate.

Every time you choose what’s defensible over what’s distinctive.
Every time you trade belief for alignment.

You pay for it later.
In attention you have to buy back.

Because the phrase is rarely what it sounds like.
It’s what it allows.

“We’re not Patagonia.” = “We don’t want to commit at that depth.”
“It’s not practical.” = “We won’t reorganize around our values.”
“Our metrics don’t justify it.” = “We avoid risks we can’t measure.”

None of this is irrational.

But over time, the pattern compounds.
Campaigns replace commitments.
Optics replace accountability.
Media spend replaces trust.

And Patagonia gets misunderstood in the process.

The mistake is treating it like a model to copy.

It’s not.
It’s a proof point.

Not of environmentalism.
Of what happens when a company organizes around something real and sticks with it.

You don’t need to sell organic cotton to take that lesson.

You need a longer clock than your competitors.
And a willingness to make decisions that don’t pay off right away.

Most enduring brands didn’t optimize early.
They committed early.

So the question isn’t whether you’re Patagonia.

It’s whether you’re willing to organize around anything the way they do.

“We’re not Patagonia” isn’t humility.
It’s often fear, dressed up as realism.

I don’t say that as an outsider.

I’ve been in those rooms.
The pressure is real.
The constraints are real.

But so is the cost.

In a landscape of “vibe-based” leadership, honesty is underpriced.
Not performative honesty.
Operational honesty.

So instead of using that sentence to shut something down, use it to start something harder:

You can argue your way into a budget.
You have to prove your way into someone’s life.

Most teams choose what they can defend.
And then wonder why it doesn’t stick.

That’s the person I think I am.

But my behavior looks a lot more like MrBeast.

That gap is the story.

Not media.
Not platforms.

Us.

The New York Times wins on importance.
Journalism. Rigor. Depth.

MrBeast wins on choice.

This isn’t a comparison of what matters.
It’s a comparison of what gets chosen.

And when no one is making you pay attention, only one of those matters.

We spent decades optimizing for authority.
Credentials. Precision. Truth.

And assumed attention would follow.

It didn’t.

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We didn’t lose attention to misinformation.
We lost it to friction.

Being right no longer wins.
Being chosen does.

The Times is built for the person people say they are.
Informed. Intentional. Willing to lean in.

MrBeast is built for the person we actually are.
Tired. Distracted. Looking for something that feels worth it.

If you are building for the person people say they are,
you are building for a ghost.

MrBeast averages over 200 million views per video.
A New York Times article reaches around 70,000 readers.

That’s not a gap.
That’s a different species.

One is a library you choose to enter.
The other is a cultural event that finds you.

The difference comes down to one thing.

Friction.

The Times requires effort.
MrBeast removes it.

One feels like work.
The other feels like relief.

According to the Reuters Institute, 36% of people actively avoid the news because it lowers their mood.

They are not rejecting facts.
They are rejecting the experience.

I do this too.

I say I value depth.
But I choose ease.

In rooms where decisions get made, this shows up clearly.

Teams spend months refining messages no one was ever going to choose.
Not because they weren’t good.
Because they asked too much.

This is the miscalculation.

We assume people will make time for us.

They won’t.

Because we don’t.

Creators understand this instinctively.

MrBeast is not just an entertainer.
He is a system for removing friction.

Every frame, every second is engineered to be chosen.

This isn’t just a post about the media.

It’s brands.
Schools.
Nonprofits.
Anyone competing for time.

If your work requires effort, you are competing uphill.
If it requires sustained attention, you are competing against behavior itself.

Relevance has replaced authority.

Most of us are still optimizing for the wrong one.

I still read The New York Times.
Just not as much as I think I do.

So what wins when no one is making you pay attention?

Source: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

PART 2 OF THE SERIES: THE UNSIGNED CONTRACT

Part 1 → AI Is Changing the Deal (and No One Agreed to It)

Last week, I argued the deal has already changed.

We are participating in systems we didn’t explicitly agree to.
We are feeding tools that are learning from us.
And the terms of that exchange are unclear.

That was the Permission Gap.

This week is what happens next.

When that system scales and wins, who actually benefits?

Because when the gap widens far enough, value doesn’t just get tense.
It gets redistributed.

The Permission Gap becomes the Extraction Zone.

This isn’t theoretical. We’re already in it.

A junior designer generates concepts in seconds.
A strategist compresses days of thinking into hours.
A writer feeds in drafts and gets something faster, sharper, cleaner.

Those outputs are built on prior contributions.

And in the Extraction Zone, contribution doesn’t guarantee a share of the upside.

AI doesn’t distribute value.
It amplifies whatever system it enters.

If the system concentrates value, AI accelerates concentration.
If the system shares value, AI scales sharing.

Right now, we’re seeing the former.

Gains concentrate at the top.
Disruption distributes everywhere else.

We are not just automating tasks.
We are industrializing the white-collar economy.

The blue-collar economy got there first.
Walk a factory floor. The system runs with minimal human input.

This is that shift applied to thinking work.

Here’s the mechanism.

Value is created collectively.
Ownership is captured centrally.

Millions of people contribute context, judgment, and training data
in small, continuous ways.

But the returns don’t flow back to those contributors.
They aggregate to fewer players.

Consider this snapshot:
→ OpenAI, about 11 years old, approaching a trillion-dollar valuation
→ Ford, more than 120 years old, about $50 billion.

That roughly 20x gap isn’t just growth.
It’s a different value structure.

That is the Extraction Zone.

Which raises the question: is this inevitable?
Or is there a choice?

There are two models.

The Extraction Model
→ Optimize for margin
→ Treat labor as a cost
→ Capture the upside centrally

The Citizen Approach
→ Treat contributors as stakeholders
→ Share in the gains
→ Protect the system over time

The Extraction Zone is what happens when the first model dominates.

In that model, AI becomes a tool to cut headcount, compress wages, and remove “human cost.”

It looks efficient.
In the short term, it is.

But the cost shows up elsewhere.

Remove entry-level roles, and you don’t just reduce expense.
You remove the path.

You eliminate the layer where people learn, build judgment, and become the next generation.

You’re not optimizing the system.
You’re consuming it.

You’re burning the furniture to keep the house warm.

There is another way.

The Citizen Approach.

If AI expands output, the gains are shared with the people whose work made that output possible.

There isn’t a clean playbook for this yet.
But there are choices.

Where your signal goes.
What you contribute.
And what you hold back.

Not all systems acknowledge contribution equally.
Some will. Most won’t.

You can be more deliberate about where you show up.

You can protect the work that compounds, how you think, not just what you produce.

You can support models experimenting with shared upside.
They’re early. Imperfect. But adoption is signal, and systems follow signal.

You can pay attention to the terms when they matter.
Not every click. But the ones that define the relationship.

And you can name the dynamic when you see it.

Because once people see it, they don’t unsee it.

None of this fixes the system overnight.

But it does something that matters.

It makes participation a choice again.

Because if this system is being trained on us, then the only real leverage we have is how and whether we continue to participate.

The question isn’t whether AI wins.

It’s whether we understand the terms before it does.

PART 1 OF A NEW SERIES: THE UNSIGNED CONTRACT

I use these tools every day.
I recommend them. I build with them.

And if I’m honest, I don’t actually know what I’ve agreed to.

That’s not a throwaway line.

It’s the problem.

For the last twenty years, the deal was simple.
You got powerful tools for free*.

The asterisk is the not-really-free part.
In exchange for access, companies used your data to show you ads.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was legible.
You could understand the trade.

And most of us decided it was worth it.

That deal is over.

We’ve quietly moved from an ad economy to a training economy.

Your emails, your documents, your photos, your code, your ideas.
It is not just data anymore.
It is raw material.

Not for selling you something.
For building something.

Something that can increasingly replicate your judgment.
And eventually, your value.

This isn’t an ad model anymore.
It’s a training model.
And we didn’t explicitly agree to be the training data for our own replacement.

And to be clear, I’m not outside this.

I benefit from these tools.
I move faster because of them.
I’ve probably already given away more than I realize.

Which is exactly why this is uncomfortable.

Because the shift didn’t happen through a decision.
It happened through adoption.

No one sat us down and said, “By the way, the tools you’re using to do your job are also learning how to do your job.”

We just kept clicking “accept” on terms none of us actually read.

The Permission Gap

We’re now living inside something I call the Permission Gap.

It’s the space between what companies are technically capable of doing…
and what we actually believe they have the right to do.

And right now, that gap is widening fast.

Because capability is compounding.
And permission isn’t.

When power grows faster than permission, the system doesn’t stay stable.
It corrects.

And we have no real sense of what that correction looks like at scale.

I felt this personally the first time I pasted my own work into a model and had a simple, nagging question.

Where does this go next?

Not the output.
The input.

Who sees it?
Who learns from it?
Who benefits from it?

And more pointedly: Did I just contribute to something that makes what I do less valuable?

I didn’t have an answer.
I still don’t.

When Innovation Starts to Feel Like Extraction

There is a line.
We are crossing it.

We have moved from using tools to extend human capability to feeding systems that absorb human capability.

At scale.
Quietly.

Without a clear, shared understanding of the terms.
It’s almost as though the terms are ceasing to exist.

The issue is not that companies can do this.
It is that they are acting as if capability equals permission.

The Permission Gap is where innovation stops feeling like progress and starts feeling like extraction.

This is where trust breaks.
Not because people are anti-technology.
But because the relationship no longer feels mutual.

What Would a Fair Deal Actually Look Like?

If this is the new model, and it clearly is, then the terms need to change.

Not as a philosophical exercise.
As a condition of trust.

A few things feel non-negotiable:

→ You should know what’s real.
If you’re reading, watching, or interacting with something generated by a machine, it should be clearly labeled. Not buried. Not implied. Obvious.

→ You should have a human to appeal to.
If an AI system affects your job, your money, or your reputation, there should be a clear path to a real person. Not a loop. Not a bot. A person.

→ You should share in the value you help create.
If your work, your data, your thinking is part of the system, then the upside shouldn’t accrue in only one direction.

→ You should have an advocate.
Not just tools that optimize for the platform—but systems that act on your behalf. Read the fine print. Protect your interests. Push back when needed.

None of this stops the technology.
It just makes the relationship explicit.

The Contract We Never Signed

Right now, this all feels inevitable.
Like something happening around us.

But it’s not.

These systems don’t work without participation.
They don’t learn without input.
They don’t scale without us.

We have more leverage than we think.
We’re just not using it.

Because the shift has been gradual enough to feel normal…
and beneficial enough to feel worth it.

The contract for the future is currently unsigned.
The question isn’t whether it gets written.

It’s who writes it.

And whether we realize what’s happening before the terms are already locked in.

On one side, our political ‘soft power’ is self-combusting in a way that is no longer just a feeling, but a clinical reality. Having forfeited our status as the ‘model’ the world emulates, we have become a cautionary tale of democratic dissatisfaction.

Yet, there is a second reality: the American engine of innovation remains unrivaled.

While the world may increasingly reject our politics, they are also increasingly dependent on our code.

The brand is split: The “Diplomat” is failing, but the “Frontier” is thriving.

The Artemis Signal: Proof over Rebuttal

When the Orion capsule splashed down in the Pacific earlier this month after a perfect lunar flyby, it did more than complete a flight plan: it lived up to its name, Integrity.

In a branding context, the Integrity name is a strategic masterstroke because it addresses our greatest national deficit. While America’s political integrity is being questioned in embassies and cratering in global polls, the technical integrity of our systems has just provided something undeniable.

I’ve participated in enough brand post-mortems to know that you don’t argue people back into believing in you.

By functioning perfectly at a level of complexity no other nation can yet replicate, Integrity has reset the global conversation, even if just for a moment, from what we say to what we can do.

Artemis II provides three critical stabilizers for the American brand:

• Competence as Currency: In a world of “vibe-based” leadership, Artemis is an act of pure, high-stakes competence.

• The Persistence of the Long-Game: It signals to partners and rivals that despite the frantic pace of our domestic noise, we still possess the strategic stomach for the long horizon.

• The Open Platform: By including an international crew, Artemis proves the American story isn’t a closed loop. Despite a domestic obsession with isolationism, the United States remains the world’s primary infrastructure for shared ambition.

Possibility over Politics

The United States has always been strongest when its actions make its ideals feel plausible.

Not perfect. Just plausible.

To be clear, Artemis doesn’t “fix” our geopolitical friction, but it makes the country legible again as a place that moves forward.

It reminds a skeptical world that even if they are wary of the American “Executive,” they are still deeply invested in American “Possibility”.

One mission can remind the world who we were.

Only a pattern can convince them who we are.

Artemis II is the start of that pattern—a pivot from a brand that asks for approval to a brand that provides the proof.

Data sources: Gallup’s 2026 Rating World Leaders report, 2025 PEW Research Poll, Global Affairs Public Research Poll

We are currently witnessing the collapse of the shallow brand collaboration. This is the kind that generates 48 hours of PR and zero change in consumer behavior. Most brand partnerships are built to be seen, not used. They are co-branded drops that disappear as fast as they arrived.

This is not that.

On paper, a Nike x LEGO collaboration shouldn’t work. One is an athletic performance company; the other is a toy company. They exist in different worlds with different behaviors.

Usually, that is where these things fall apart. But here, they didn’t meet in the middle. They met at the problem.

The Environment Gap

In China, only about 30% of students meet recommended activity levels, despite national targets of two hours a day.

The issue isn’t awareness. It’s environment.

I’ve sat in the rooms where these “mashups” are dreamed up, and the conversation almost always starts with “What looks cool?” and almost never with “What problem are we solving?” Most responses try to convince kids to move by talking at them. But behavior doesn’t change because you said something.

Instead of a product drop, they built a playground.

It features oversized modular blocks where kids run, build, climb, and jump. Nothing is forced. Nothing is instructed. It just works.

Play is the Engine of Movement

This is the part that is easy to miss: Simple doesn’t mean obvious. It means everything unnecessary was removed.

→ LEGO is about play

→ Nike is about movement

Most collaborations mash those together and call it innovation. This one doesn’t. It lets each brand do its job. Play creates movement. Movement extends play.

Most brands design messages. This designs an environment.

There is no stretch, no forced narrative, and no “entering a new category.” It is just two brands doing what they’ve always done, in the same place, against the same problem.

The New Standard

The best collaborations aren’t built for attention; they are built for behavior. That is a much higher bar.

This project exposes the gap: Most brands are still optimizing for being seen. They are chasing “likes” while ignoring the actual lives of their customers.

If your brand disappeared tomorrow, would your customers lose a message they liked, or a tool they actually used to live their lives? Which one is harder to replace?